Jeux
by girl meat
Summary: Maybe it's not the best form of rebellion, and Lux Castaldin won't bring down the Capitol, but she's doing what she can and she will be glorious. The killer. The girl who shows onscreen what the Games do to you. A study in televised murder-suicide.


_i've been writing fic for various fandoms for six years, but this is my first published work of any worth. oc in the hunger games is overdone and i was trying to see if i can make it work. all i can say about it is that it isn't awful? idek man._

_reviews would be greatly appreciated, and i always review back._

_emma x_

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><p>It's too cold for autumn, and even though I run to keep my blood flowing fast and hot around my body, I'm late to the reaping. Although it's only just. I could have pulled sick again - it wasn't hard last time and it'd be easy this year too - but I didn't. I slip unnoticed into the possibles, push my way to about the middle and watch the bustle on stage. Odd-looking woman with thick pale hair and a clipboard, a little twig of a boy doing something unnecessary with the glass reapball. We shift as one person in the breeze, roped into red velvet barriers for as far as I can see.<p>

The child next to me turns, only just twelve or thirteen, and smiles gappily. I recognise her as a girl from my neighbourhood and I twist my mouth into an approximation of a grin. "I'm so excited," she says.

"Are you?" I notice my voice is dry from lack of use, rasping against my tonsils. I crack the knuckle on my ring finger and she flinches slightly.

"Yeah," she says, and nods fervently. "You know, maybe this year someone will do something. Bring down the people in the Capitol. Maybe this'll be the last Games! Wouldn't that be amazing?"

My eyebrow twitches and I try to remember who her parents are. Everyone teaches their kids not to say anything bad about the regime in public since about the time they learn to walk, and the ones who don't learn fast enough don't survive. "People can hear you," I tell her. "Hush."

I jump when she takes my hand and looks up at me with a light in her eyes. My palm is dry, skin cracked like fruit peel, against her soft skinny baby fingers. I could break them in a squeeze, they're that fragile. I wonder idly if she has hollow bones. "I know," she says, lowering her voice to a whisper. "And it doesn't make sense that they're so powerful when it's so bad here. I just wish we could stop them. Is that so bad?"

"There's nothing wrong with hope. You've just got to keep your mouth shut about it." I open my other hand and look at the two juicy, fat blackberries rolling in it. "Would you like one?"

She thanks me and picks the largest one from where it rests in my open palm. I pop the other into my mouth and crush it with my tongue against my molars, staining my cheeks. I taste the patch of icy air where I plucked them from a bush I've slung some stolen netting over to keep birds away, the sharp tang of wild fruit on the edges of 1. My brothers and I will harvest them later today - no work on reaping day - after we watch our two yearly sacrifices pass the point of no return. The berries ripen and spoil fast, and my aunt will transplant a few of the seeds to our garden patch, turn most of them into a preserve. It'll go like hot cakes to the rich families here, with the children who train for circus death.

Everything goes quiet and the girl grabs my hand harder. Another knuckle clicks, this time the one on my pinky. "I'm scared," she whispers.

"Don't be, you'll be fine," I murmur, and then the woman steps up to center stage. She addresses us, but her introductory words slip past my ears; the soft calibre of her voice caresses my eardrums but I take nothing in. I pull my coat tighter around myself against the wind.

"But we're in _1_," the girl says, her voice breaking. "If I get chosen, _nobody's_ going to volunteer. I heard people saying volunteering isn't _allowed _this year. Something about getting a good balance - equal chance - "

"Look," I hiss, "they've taken out so many tesserae, you _won't get picked_." My voice softens. "Anyway, I promise it's just a rumor. Someone will volunteer for you. You're so young."

"Our female tribute from District 1." The woman's hair fascinates me as the bright sun shines off it. Her high cheekbones and colourless eyelashes, reflected on the supersizer screens hoisted above the stage, hold my stare, her skull obvious under her skin. Her smile is captivating and I cannot stop looking. The expression, perfect and doesn't change as the thin boy draws a slip of paper from the reaping ball, unfolds it and hands it to her. Pause.

The crowd holds its breath as one monstrous organism.

"Lux Castaldin," she says. "Lux?"

The girl next to me squeals and dimly I realise I have a tendon-snapping grip on her fingers. My hand goes limp. The crowd parts, and turns, and I place my right foot on the ground suddenly clear in front of me. Left foot next. I am aware of how tight my boots are around my toes, and the wearing underneath the balls of my feet. The stone floor is cold.

The faces around me are incomprehensible.

A pin-sharp inhale stings the inside of my nose and I blink a tear away. Cameras zoom in to focus on me. The icy wind lifts long curls of my hair to chill my neck, and on the superscreens I see black strands floating around my face, eyes startlingly bright and wet against the cold-air red tinges on my lashlines and my cheeks and the tip of my nose. I trip getting up onto the stage, rolling over onto the side of my ankle.

The woman smiles at me and helps me up, contrived. A flush spreads across my shoulders. "Remember the special rule this year?" She turns to the crowd and I regain my footing uneasily. The faces in the front row melt into one, projecting hatred. Envy, maybe. They would do the same for one of their friends; it makes no difference. The eighteen-year-olds, especially, feel they have been robbed. "I know, I know you're all disappointed - but isn't it exciting? Chance is the focus of the game, after all!"

Talk breaks out in the crowd again, and they don't hate me. They hate a perceived unfairness, the fact that they can't choose to kill themselves in a greater inequality. Games. These are not games, I remind myself. This is childmurder rounded and polished like a piece of jasper to be a celebration, and it is a celebration of our death. My heart sinks, and it starts to set in like a boneclinging infection.

I feel our mentor's eyes on me. Boring into the small of my back, scanning my kidneys for proteins that signify fear. "But let's have a round of applause for our tribute!" the woman says. I wonder whether her perkiness is false. Figuratively, she is rolling over to expose her belly, like a fluff-furred dog. I consider what else I can think of.

A few whistles sound and a scattered clap breaks out, but their hearts aren't in it. For anyone else, it would be the same. I am not going to win. The wind cuts into my lips like a knife.


End file.
